


Found In Forbidden Nights

by alienor_woods



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Jon "Oathbreaker" Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-08 08:44:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14690541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienor_woods/pseuds/alienor_woods
Summary: In which Robb Stark still refuses to trade Jaime Lannister for his sisters, but Jon Snow decides if being an oathbreaker means he can tell strategy and politics to fuck off, then it's worth it to take matters into his own hands.'(It’s the after, though, that Jon and Sansa hadn’t bargained on.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thefairfleming](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairfleming/gifts).



> Inspired a long, long time ago by a prompt by TheFairFleming, reading something along the lines of "okay but what if Jon did run away to wage war with Robb, and what if he went down to King's Landing to rescue Sansa all on his own." And I was all, "HELLO, REPORTING FOR DUTY" and made this thing you can read below.
> 
> Title from "My Head Is Not My Home" by MS MR.
> 
> Originally published 9/2013 through 12/2013. Light revisions throughout.

She wakes up suddenly – her heart pounding and a cold sweat breaking out across her chest.

 

Someone’s hand is over her mouth and she thrashes against it, inhaling sharply through her nose to scream until she hears shushing. “Sansa—Sansa,” she hears, and it’s the accent first that stops her from letting out her shriek. It’s so familiar but—faded by time because no one else here has an accent like that, only her, now. “It’s alright,” comes next and her mind whispers his name.

 

She grabs his wrist and yanks it from her face, squinting in the darkness at the black shape framed by the curtains of her bed. “Jon? Am I dreaming? Why are you in my—“

 

“No, you’re not dreaming. Where is Arya? Isn’t she here with you?”

 

Sansa shakes her head. She can see more clearly now—the moon hangs low outside her bedroom window. She’d left it open let the breeze through. There’s rustling on the other side of her bed. She digs her nails into Jon’s skin.

 

He hushes her, runs his free hand down her arm. “It’s Ghost, just Ghost. Lady? “

 

He feels her shudder under his palm. “Gone. Dead,” she whimpers, and Jon wants to ask why, but it’s well past midnight and their time is short. He urges her out of bed. “Arya’s gone too,” she tells him, her toes curling when they make contact with the frigid flagstones. “I think she might have gotten away. She was always sneaking around the sewers and no one has seen her since before Joffrey killed Father.”

 

“She’s always been clever,” Jon says, and the way that Sansa says _not like me_ makes him feel stupid, so stupid. “Can you get dressed?”

 

She hesitates, looking up at the dim features of his face. He looks like he’s taller, but she is too, now, so she’s not sure. “We won’t be able to leave. We’ll be caught. And then—they’ll hurt us.”

 

Her words have a certain, knowing edge, like she’d be able to tell him what getting hurt entails, so he grabs her hands and tugs her up onto her feet. “No, we won’t. I got in, didn’t I? But hurry, Sansa. Robb and Lady Stark are at Riverrun and we need to get moving before the castle wakes and realizes you’re gone.”

 

She lunges forward, fisting his shirt, and the momentum takes them backwards into a shaft of moonlight. He suddenly realizes that the last time he’d seen her was the day they all left Winterfell, when she’d taken Joffrey’s hand and he’d helped her into the Queen’s wheelhouse.

 

Dark circles lie under her eyes now, and the baby fat has been drained from her face, leaving sharp, high cheekbones that he wouldn’t have expected from the girl who’d loved lemon cakes. She looks like Lady Stark, he thinks, but like Father and Uncle Benjen, too.

 

“Robb? Mother?” she asks with wild eyes. “You’re taking me to them?”

 

“Of course,” Jon says. “Why else would I come?”

 

Sansa suddenly laughs. “I just thought I would never leave,” she says, her voice high and strained. “I thought I was going to die here, just like Father.” Jon’s chest feels tight, and if he had the time and the patience, he’d let Ghost tear into the Red Keep until blood ran out the windows, like the direwolf had been wanting to do ever since Jon snuck them in through the kitchens.

 

 _He can smell the evil here_ , Jon had realized. _He can probably still smell Father’s blood_.

 

“Get dressed,” he tells her again instead. She nods and untangles her fingers from his shirt to find something to wear.

 

Her nightrail is sleeveless and several hands-breadths too short now. The hem hits her shins rather than brushing the floor.

 

She fumbles in the trunk at the foot of her bed, feeling for the rough fabric of her green dress. It’s easy to slip into, ties at the front, and she leans on Ghost when she slides on her stockings and then into her boots—the ones that she had brought from Winterfell. They’re tight, almost painful, but her only other option is the pair of jacquard slippers by the door and even Sansa knows that tightness is better than impracticality on the Kingsroad. Jon is impatient, pacing by the window while she pats on her dressing table for a ribbon to tie off her braid.

 

“My cloak,” she whispers, and only a moment later Jon is draping it around her shoulders and urging her forward.

 

Silently, Jon unbars her door. Ghost slips through first. Jon takes her hand and pulls her behind him.

 

The two men that had guarded her door are slumped against the wall, and Sansa nearly falls when her boots slip in their blood. In the torchlight of the corridor, Sansa sees that Ghost’s fur is matted with blood from his snout, down his throat and chest, to the tops of his forepaws. _Oh_ , she thinks, but she doesn’t feel sad. These guards hadn’t helped her, not once, just told King Joffrey and Queen Cersei about everything that she did and everywhere she went.

 

The castle is silent, except for when they hear movement ahead of them and Jon says Ghost’s name quietly, sending the great direwolf loping soundlessly into the darkness ahead of them. Wet gurgles, rending flesh, muffled clangs of armor against stone, and then Ghost returns to their sides, red tongue lolling out of his mouth.

They go through the kitchens--

 

(“No one’s here,” Sansa whispers, and Jon’s hand twitches in hers.

“Jon, they were just servants—“

“No—Ghost and I sent them into the cellar until morning.”

Relief washes over her; Jon is still  _good_ , even though he thought nothing of killing the guards, who are servants in just a different way)

 

\--and across the yard and through the gate to King’s Landing proper. Jon tugs her into a trot, and even though her feet hurt and she keeps tripping in the dark and her lungs and thighs and sides burn after just a few minutes, she keeps going going going until they reach the Iron Gate. Bodies lay scattered around the turrets, and the door is cracked just wide enough for the three of them to slide through.

 

A stallion waits in the treeline, his metal bit clacking against his teeth as he chews on some grass. Sansa feels like she’s floating and her knees start to shake a bit as they get closer to the steed.

_I’m out, I’m out_ , she thinks. She looks over her shoulder, expecting to see waves of gold cloaks rushing after them. There’s nothing though—just the rustling of the wind through the trees and the crash of the waves against the coastline.

 

She sits behind Jon, her arms clasped around his waist and holding on for dear life because he keeps the horse at a flat gallop along the Kingsroad until the sun peeks over the horizon and it’s possible for them to see more than dim shapes in darkness. He steers them off the road, and they continue through the woods, staying at a canter when they can, a delicate walk when the terrain gets too rough for Blackfoot (that’s what Jon calls him) to handle.

 

Later that night, Jon waits for the lights in a farmer’s homestead snuff out before he eases the door to the barn open and helps her into the hayloft.

 

It’s awkward at first, laid down next to each other with an empty chasm of space between then and arms stiff at their sides. Finally, she asks him the question that’s been stuck in her throat all day— _why did you come? How did you know?_

 

He’s silent for several minutes, and she nearly thinks that he’s already asleep, but he takes a deep breath tells her in hushed tones that Robb had been offered a trade by Jaime Lannister—the _Kingslayer_ —and Robb’d flatly refused.

 

“So I left,” he murmurs. “Robb’s the King, not me. I’m already an oathbreaker; I don’t need to worry about honor or looking weak in front of my bannermen.”

 

Sansa turns the words over in her mind until the full weight of what Robb refusing to trade one Lannister for two Starks means. She rolls away from Jon, the hay crunching underneath her and poking into her skin. She bites down on her fist to keep Jon from hearing her cry, but she can’t do anything about her loud, jerky breaths.

 

Jon sighs and turns to his side, too, and hesitantly puts his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Sansa,” is all he says, and she falls asleep with the taste of salt in her mouth.

 

* * *

 

 

No one knows Jon’s come; he made sure of it.

 

Jon had stayed quiet while Lady Stark had pleaded with Robb to make the trade, but he’d also seen the way that Robb had hesitated and snuck glances at his other bannermen in the room. Robb’d said that they would sack King’s Landing instead and Jon knew that the girls would be long dead before they ever reached the capitol. He’d barely been a member of the Night’s Watch long enough to truly own the title, but he’d been around honorless thieves and murderers with the same shifty eyes that Joffrey’d had at Winterfell, back when he’d just been a prince.

 

Joffrey had taken Lord Stark’s head without thinking twice about it—did Robb truly think that Sansa and Arya would be safe just because they were girls? Jon would never say it out loud, but Robb may well lose this campaign, still, and why should sweetsmelling Sansa and little Arya pay the price for Robb’s pride?

 

So, he’d saddled Blackfoot, told Robb that he was taking Ghost hunting, and that he’d be back in time for the council meeting.

 

* * *

 

 

They reach Riverrun a half-fortnight later.

 

Blackfoot is thin and exhausted from nearly a week at a swift pace and picks his way carefully along the sandbanks of the Red River until Jon and Sansa dismount.

 

They scramble up the steep embankment on foot, Sansa nearly falling to her hands and knees at more than one point, only to be gently hauled back up each time by Jon’s hand on her elbow.

 

Ghost runs ahead of them and bodyslams Grey Wind in greeting. Sansa sees the high walls of Riverrun jutting into the sky ahead of them, bright white and gray Stark banners snapping in the wind alongside the Tully banners, and she grabs onto Jon before her knees give out underneath her from relief and exhaustion.

 

“Thank you,” she tells him, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Thank you. Thank you.”

 

“Hey, now,” he replies, turning her towards him and wiping her cheeks with the back of his hand. “You don’t want to be crying like this when you see them.”

 

Her hair whips across her face with the brisk wind, tangling in his fingers. She tries to help him, carding her fingers through the bulk of it and holding it back in one fist. The ribbon had been lost two days past, in a hayloft some ways north of Strong Bent. Jon had awakened with Sansa’s head on his numb arm and his face pressed into the downy nest of her loose hair, and several minutes of patting through the hay hadn’t turned it up. Her face had screwed up in annoyance, but the horizon had begun to lighten and Jon had wanted to pilfer through the farmers’ root cellar before they left.

 

“You’re right,” she says, sniffing and wiping at her nose in a very unladylike manner. It should have surprised Jon, but he’d known since that night in her chamber in the Red Keep that she was not the same girl that he’d known at Winterfell. Nearly a week on the road had only reinforced that thought. She glances back up at Riverrun, and then down at her tight dress and her dirty fingernails.

 

Jon watches, helpless, as her face falls.

 

“Snow!! Where in the seven hells have you been?” one of the soldiers calls out. Jon breaks out of his trance and raises his arm in greeting. The soldier gestures crudely at Sansa and waggles his eyebrows and Jon frowns.

 

“Go and tell the King and Lady Stark that I’m back and that I have Lady Sansa with me,” he orders in the Lord Snow voice he’d taken on at Castle Black and kept in use as one of King Robb’s favored councilmen.

 

The soldier’s mouth drops open, and after a moment of shock, he turns on his heel and runs back into camp. The two direwolves lope behind him.

 

Sansa is trying to smooth the wrinkles out her dress, and Jon pats at his tunic, eventually tugging one of his laces free. He pulls his dagger from its sheath at his hip and cuts a generous length of it, leaving his collar open wide across his chest. 

 

Color rising in her cheeks, she forces her tangled hair into a braid and ties it off, and then Jon gently takes her hands and uses the tip of his dagger to scrape most of the dirt out from underneath her nails.

 

“Here,” he murmurs gently, licking his thumb and wiping away a smudge of dirt on her neck that her pulled-back hair has revealed. She’s recomposed herself: set her jaw and pulled her shoulders back like she is preparing to do battle, so Jon silently offers her his arm and leads her through the encampment.

 

Lady Stark is in a full sprint down the main hall of the castle when they get inside, Robb close behind, and when Lady Stark screams out Sansa’s name and pulls her daughter into her arms, sobbing into her hair, Jon knows he did the right thing to risk both their lives to get Sansa out of the Red Keep. Robb clasps Jon tightly, muttering that he’d thought Jon was dead, but all Jon sees is the way that Sansa’s eyes darken when they settle on Robb. She won’t forget, he knows. Not for a long time.

 

Without the need to march on King’s Landing for Sansa (or Arya, Sansa tells them by the fireplace, drinking far too easily from the goblet of wine in her hand) they retreat back into the North, dragging the Kingslayer with them.

 

Behind closed doors in the Red Keep, King Joffrey rants and screams and wants to raze the country from Riverrun to the Wall, but Tywin coldly informs him that the Starks had held off the Andals, crushed the Boltons, and had only bent the knee to the Iron Throne when the wings of three dragons had cast a long shadow over Winterfell. Joffrey shrieks that he is the _king_ , but even a king is no match for three Lannisters that all agree on their love of family.

 

So, the Kingslayer heads back south, and cartographers ink their quills, approximate Greywater Watch, and slice Westeros in two.

 

Lady Stark never thanks him, but Jon didn’t do it for her in the first place. He does, however, notice that she encourages Robb to give weight to Jon’s council, on account of his time in the Night’s Watch, of course, and personally treats with Castle Black to officially break Jon’s oath in exchange for fifty of their hostages from the Southern Campaign, as Robb’s council has taken to calling it.

 

Sansa keeps Robb at an arms-length for a long time, although she takes to Jeyne Westerling quite quickly, especially when the Northern Queen’s belly rounds—suspiciously only after Queen Jeyne’s mother leaves Court to return to the South.

 

She prefers walks with Ghost, and with Jon when he joins them. After several moons’ turns, she begins telling him about her time in King’s Landing, and it doesn’t take him long to realize that she shares this information with no one else. They’re safe back at Winterfell now, with Rickon and Bran and easily dealing with the Iron Islands.

 

Robb takes Theon’s betrayal worse and more personally than anything else, Jon thinks. But Jon sometimes wonders that Theon may not have had as much choice as Robb likes to believe, so Jon tries to think pityingly of the boy that had swung wooden swords with them.

 

But for all the quiet and peace that they thank the Gods for, there are times when Sansa talks about Joffrey and Cersei that make Jon wish that it were early morning in a quiet hayloft again, so that he could wrap his arms around her and try to take some of her pain away, like he used to try to press his body heat into her chilled, goosebumped skin.

 

Sansa dreams of those mornings too, of Jon’s solid weight against her side and his slow, deep breaths against her neck. She knows that she should feel guilty about the way it twists her stomach into knots when all of the suitors that Robb trots before her barely cause her to flutter an eyelash.

 

He and Queen Jeyne and Mother pick them based on _before-Sansa_. They’re all sweet and clean and don’t sweat or get dirty like Jon had after long days on Blackfoot’s back or like he does now in the training yard. Their fathers make them shave before meeting the King’s most beloved sister, so their faces aren’t rough like the underside of Jon’s chin, where she’d pushed her face at night when her nose got cold.

 

But then she remembers the feel of the Kingsguards’ mailed fists against her cheeks, distractedly runs her fingers along the scars that peek out above the neckline of her dress, and she doesn’t feel guilty at all.

 

* * *

 

 

Later, after Daenerys Targaryen effortlessly sacks King’s Landing with her three dragons and her “nephew” at her side (everyone, even Sansa, has done the calculations and knows that Aegon Targaryen can’t be _Aegon Targaryen_ ) and Robb calls his bannerman, determined not to be the second King Who Knelt, Howland Reed tells them all that Lord Eddard Stark had brought more than Lyanna’s bones home from Dorne; he’d brought her trueborn son as well, on a promise to keep him safe from Robert Baratheon. Neither Daenerys nor Aegon want Rhaegar’s presumptive heir in the Red Keep, and Jon has no desire to leave Winterfell, so the North and the South decide to end their differences the way feuding families have done for centuries—with a marriage.

 

“You don’t have to do this,” Jon tells her on a walk across the moors with Ghost, after he’d refused to meet her eyes for nearly a fortnight. “We’ve thought of each other as siblings for so long…”

 

But he’s saying it for her benefit, for what he thinks she _must_ feel, because he still wakes up hard some mornings, after dreaming about her thin nightrail in the moonlight of her bedchamber in King’s Landing and the way her breasts had strained against her too-small dress the whole way to Riverrun, and only spurred on by Sansa’s instant correction to anyone that Jon is only her half-brother-cum-cousin.

 

She eyes him skeptically for a moment, and then shrugs. “How very _Targaryen_ of you,” she finally replies with a twist of her mouth, and Jon can’t help himself—he laughs.

 

She’d been inelegantly sarcastic as a child, but Jon thinks that her time with Queen Cersei has given her humor a dark refinement. Sometimes the things she says are so brilliantly turned and twisted around on themselves that only Ladies Stark and Mormont cough into their wineglasses, everyone else taking her bland compliments at face value.

 

They walk a little while longer in silence, until Sansa stops at the top of a hill and tugs her cloak higher on her shoulders. A light snow is falling, a mere precursor to the Long Night that all the prophecies say is coming soon, and Sansa closes her eyes and turns her face into the wind.

 

She’s sixteen now, just a hair below eye-level with Jon, and she’s worn her hair loose today, letting it fly like a banner of molten gold behind her. Jon waits, because she has this look on her face that he recognizes, one that usually comes before she talks about the Red Keep.

 

“You know that I pray in the Godswood now, right?” she asks, and when Jon nods, she continues: “I started in King’s Landing. I couldn’t stand to go up the steps of the Sept there—that’s where Father was killed. I used to pray for Robb’s victory and Joffrey’s death…I thought that the only way that I would leave would be for Robb to march his army down and crash into the Red Keep and rescue me.

 

“You were there—you know what it’s like. I thought it would take tens of thousands of men to save me. I didn’t even think about what you did. It was so clever though, Jon. So clever. You could have died; we both could have. I thought that we were going to be caught and killed up until the moment we got to Riverrun. There are still some days that I think that I’m dreaming, and I’m going to wake up and be back in the Red Keep again.”

 

She cuts herself off and turns away. Jon moves closer to her and puts his hand on her arm, barely palpable underneath her heavy cloak. She leans into his touch.

 

“You saved me, Jon. You broke into the capitol, stole into my room, and secreted me away under the cover of darkness when no one else would.”

 

She’s peering up at him with bright eyes and Jon shakes his head, his lips pressed into a thin line. “Sansa, you don’t owe me anything for that.”

 

Sansa sighs, exasperated, and turns to face him fully. “Jon Snow, if I felt I owed you, I would have tried to repay you long before now. What I’m trying to tell you is that you’re brave. Braver than Robb, and until you told me about what…he said, I hadn’t thought that possible. And you’re kind, and you have a good heart. And I haven’t felt about you as a true sister should for a while, so I’m not about to start now.”

 

There’s heat in her eyes when she says the last few lines, and his stomach turns over the same way it always does when he thinks about her and half-forgets that they were raised as siblings.

 

He suddenly realizes that this is the same expression she wore when they danced together at the feast to celebrate the birth of Prince Eddard nearly six moons past. It had been a fast-paced, whirling Northern dance without the polite exchange of partners that Southern dances used, and—yes, he remembers now—she’d been all polite smiles at first, but Jon had been into his cups, happily drunk over the bonny babe with Robb’s copper curls and Jeyne’s dark skin. 

 

He'd had curled his fingers into her waist with more familiarity than he should have. He’d tugged her roughly against the line of his body as they’d spun around and she’d looked up at him just like this and it was _this_ expression that he’d pictured in his mind later that night when he’d wrapped his hand around his cock.

 

“Sansa—“ he starts, and then stops, because this is all so strange and he’s pretty certain Robb would execute him if he admits to any of it. She rolls her eyes and turns to face him.

 

“I know you think I was japing about Targaryens a moment ago, but I wasn’t. I know how you look at me; I’m not blind. And if you look at me like that and still think of me as a sister, then you really must take after your father’s family,” she tells him with a tilt of her head. Jon feels the heat rise in his cheeks—embarrassment, he realizes, not shame. “I think that you were lying, though, when you said you thought of me as your sibling.”

 

“I’ve tried to, I have,” he protests, because he may be her cousin now but months ago they’d believed that they shared a father and it was certainly a fact that had held a permanent residence at the back of his mind. She smiles gently at him and slips her hand inside his cloak to take his wrist.

 

“I know,” she says. “I tried, too. But—I think my soul is bound to you. I think it has been from the moment you pulled me out of my bed in King’s Landing, and always will be. I’m quite tired of pretending, Jon, and we don’t have to anymore, if we don’t want to.”

 

The hope in her eyes is what does him in. “I don’t want to pretend anymore, either,” he admits in a low voice, and lifts a hand to tuck a stray tendril of bright copper behind her ear. His fingers linger, cupping back of her neck, and his chest constricts when he sees her eyes darken and drop to his mouth. “Sansa,” he murmurs, and he hears her shuddering sigh when he presses his mouth to hers.

 

She slides her arms around his waist and presses her body up against his, and _oh_ , she feels even better than she did when he was drunk, or when he could count her ribs against his chest through her thin dress. And he’s solid and warm, and feels as filled-out as he looks, and the thought of his body under all these clothes brings a plaintive noise up out of her chest.

 

“So you’ll marry me?” she says into the wind over Jon’s shoulder, her breath hitching when his tongue slides along a cord in her neck.

 

“Of course,” he replies, pulling away to meet her eyes with a humorous tilt to his lips. “The continued peace between our kingdoms depends on it.”

 

“Well then,” Sansa quips, “let us pray for a long and fruitful marriage.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll notice that this chapter backtracks a bit before it moves forward, which is necessary for the whole Everyone Is Weirded Out Except for Jon "YOLO" Snow and Sansa "You've Been My Present Every Year" Stark theme.
> 
> Originally posted in Autumn 2013, revised and reposted 2018.

“It’s better than war, right?” Sam says with his nervous laugh—the one where his breath hitches in the middle and his eyebrows stay hiked high on his forehead.

 

It’s just the four of them in Robb’s solar: Sam, Jon, Catelyn, and Robb, the last of whom meets Sam’s eyes with a thunderous expression. After the first few lines that Sam had read from Daenerys’ missive, Catelyn had pinned Jon with an icy glare. It was one that he hadn’t been the object of for years now, and he’d pinched his lips together and crossed the room to stand at the window to avoid it.

 

He’s still there now, watching the workers in the courtyard below split timbers with wedges and hammers.

 

“This isn’t quite the alternative that I’d had in mind,” Catelyn finally says, and holds her hand out to re-read Queen Daenerys’ offer. _Order, more like_ , Jon thinks, leaning his hip against the sill. _For me, at least._

 

Robb huffs and pushes his chair back to pace behind his desk. “Why _Sansa_? Is there not another House that the Dragon Queen would be satisfied with?”

 

“Who, House Tyrell?” Catelyn asks drily, brows raised. Even Jon chuffs out a snicker. “Daenerys Targaryen would bathe Maid Margaery in flames herself if the girl dares to step a toe outside of the Reach, much less towards King’s Landing. Daenerys still has no child, which means Jon—and whomever his wife should be—are next in line.” Catelyn makes a flippant gesture at the map of Westeros hanging on the wall and continues: “So you can mark off Shireen and Myrcella Baratheon, as well.”

 

“Houses Tully and Arryn still have no daughter of marrying age,” Sam adds. “Asha Greyjoy still calls herself the Queen of the Iron Islands. And a second Dornish alliance is out of the question, given—“

 

“Rhaegar was married to Elia Martell,” Robb finishes. Two Targaryen-Dornish alliances in two generations is too much royal favor to bestow on a single Great House. He sighs and plants his fists on the surface of his desk, ignoring the crunch of parchment beneath his knuckles.

 

“She wants me in the North,” Jon says. “Or, rather, out of the South.”

 

Below the window, Rickon and Shaggydog burst out of the stables, nearly bowling over two poor girls hauling in the linens that had been line-dried in the glass gardens.

 

“Howland said that my parents were married and it makes sense—Rhaegar thought he needed three of us. It’s why she continues to insist that Aegon is _Aegon_ —the dragons won the throne for her, but the sole claim that would trump mine is Aegon’s. I would bet--” A sudden, barking laugh jumps from Jon’s chest “--that the moment I decided to take a leisurely afternoon walk southwards, she would send one of her dragons to burn me to a crisp. Rhaegal, if she’s feeling ironic.”

 

From the corner of his eye, Jon watches as Catelyn’s face shutters and she turns to face the crackling fire in the hearth. Silence permeates the room once more, broken only by Sam’s hesitant shuffling.

 

Sam and Robb are on good terms, despite Sam being an oathbreaker without Jon’s luck of sharing Stark blood. He’d kept track of all of Robb’s maps and papers during the Southern Campaign and could repeat near verbatim every conversation Robb’d had whenever Robb needed to hear it again. Robb had rewarded his service with a position at Winterfell. And yet, Sam doesn’t quite seem comfortable enough to… _sit_ in front of Robb unless he’s downed two or three horns of ale.

 

Jon knows what everyone is thinking. Daenerys may have antagonistic feelings towards Jon as a rival successor, but to deny Jon, as House Targaryen’s presumptive heir to the Iron Throne, a marriage to a Princess of Winterfell without good cause would be a massive diplomatic affront. And for her part, Sansa has fielded more than a half-dozen suitors with such beautifully disguised indifference, batting each one away like a bothersome fly buzzing ‘round her head.

 

They’d all have been decent matches, too: strapping young men with hearts in their eyes and flattering words on their lips. All from minor houses, though—not powerful enough to take House Stark’s rejection as a true slight. Sansa is gracious and kind enough to not speak a single ill word against any of them, even after the last pack horse meandered out through the porticullis.

 

But even before the truth had risen from its quiet grave, she’d still go straight from the gateyard to wherever Jon was and pull him away from whatever task he’d had at hand. She’d link their arms together, tug him close to her side, and tell him under her breath how _glad_ she was that it was all over once more.

 

He hears Robb’s intake of breath and, before Robb can even begin to form the names Alys Karstark or Dacey Mormont, Jon shakes his head and crosses the room with determined strides. “She should be in here. It’s her choice,” he mutters, and gives the door a good yank as he passes through so that it slams behind him.

 

It’s what a child would do, perhaps, but it gives his sudden twist of frustration an outlet.

 

He takes the shortest route to the opposite side of the keep by cutting through the courtyard, dodging the piles of lumber and stone that have filled every spare nook and cranny since Robb decided to increase the size of the keep. The duties of rulers have multiplied since the old days of the Kings of Winter, so the footprint of the castle must expand, and quickly.

 

Sansa has proven most helpful for Robb and Catelyn and Jeyne, having spent a fair amount of time in the Southern capitol among modern kings and queens. She was the one who insisted that Robb have a proper council room, rather than using Lord Eddard’s old solar attached to the Lord’s bedchamber, that Jeyne have her own private solar in which to entertain the women in the castle, that the Main Hall be completely redone so as to have a larger gallery and a wider dais for two thrones instead of a single Lord’s Chair, and that a completely new wing be built to house the royal family’s apartments.

 

Sansa, Jeyne, and Lady Catelyn share a single solar for now. Jon hesitates before he knocks at the door and announces brusquely that “it’s Jon.” His palms are suddenly clammy and his chest tight and he nearly walks away when he realizes that he has no idea what he’s going to say.

 

But then Jeyne swings the door wide open and the sweet and spicy scent that Jeyne has asked the kitchen maids to fold into the candles for her chambers washes over him. Sansa’s eyes meet his from across the room and his stomach flips. He tries to tell himself that it’s just hunger pains the scent is triggering, but a voice deep in the back of his head teases that it’s hunger pains alright, but a hunger for something other than food.

 

She smiles at him and sets her book aside, saying his name with such warm surprise that Jon can barely look her in the eye, knowing what he’s here for.

 

“I need to speak with you,” he blurts out, and with an arched brow, Sansa gestures to the seat beside her.

 

* * *

 

Later that night, Robb stands at the edge of the bed he shares with Jeyne, mouth agape. “She said yes?”

 

“Yes, my love.” Jeyne lays a fussing Eddard in her lap, rearranges the neckline of her shift, and switches him to her other breast. With a sigh, she lets her head fall back against her pillow. _Sweet release_.

 

“Right away?” Robb still clutches the bedsheets and furs in his fist, as if he were just now getting into bed and not as though he had been standing there for more than just a moment. “How did she say yes? Did she get upset after he left?”

 

“I was trying to be polite and not eavesdrop or pry, Robb,” she says with a hint of a chastising tone. “Jon seemed very nervous.” At her breast, Eddard’s eyes slide down, down, down, and Jeyne jostles him a bit to perk him up. She did not want to ache and leak all night long, and she knows that her babe can drink more yet. _He is his father’s son_ , Lady Stark had remarked once with a fond smile.

 

Robb groans and finally climbs into bed. “Jeyne, please—you are the only one who spoke with her and she is my—“ his voice unexpectedly catches and Jeyne looks over in surprise “my… _only_ sister.”

 

Jeyne whispers her husband’s name and reaches out as best she can with Eddard at her breast to run her knuckles over his cheek. “She wasn’t upset.” Robb leans into her hand with a doubtful sigh and Jeyne insists: “She wasn’t. Truly. It was all quite straightforward. He asked her straight out and told her that she needn’t agree, but she said yes. Then he left, and she went right back to her reading. No crying, no sad smiles, nothing, my love.”

 

“So strange,” Robb says, staring blankly over Jeyne’s shoulder for a long moment. He shakes himself out of it with quick blink and rolls onto his elbow to pet Eddard’s crown of curls. The baby coos, gurgling around the milk in his throat, and Robb chuckles. “Well, then. That’s that, I suppose. Jon. Sansa. Jon and Sansa. Sansa _and_ Jon.”

 

He’s trying to wrap his head around it, Jeyne can tell, but he’s failing miserably. His face is screwing up the same way it does when he sips her Dornish Sour by mistake. Jeyne can’t help but hide her smile by pressing a kiss to Eddard’s hair.

 

Of course, she’d left out the part where Sansa’s eyelashes had fluttered when Jon had actually spoken the words “marry me,” because she’d seen her goodsister react the exact same way when Jon would embrace her affectionately in the courtyard after returning from long tours to holdfasts with Robb. She’d seen the quick breaths Sansa would take in her chest when Jon would bend low— _too_ low, Jeyne had noted even then—over the back of her chair at feasts to whisper secrets in her ear.

 

And if she’d caught Sansa twirling a tendril of hair ‘round her finger after Jon had left while her eyes ran over the same line of poetry over and over again, well, Jeyne wouldn’t mention that either.

 

“Silly, silly,” Jeyne murmured into her babe’s skin, but whether she was speaking about Robb or about Sansa and Jon, even Jeyne wasn’t truly sure.

 

* * *

 

Jon avoids Sansa and Sansa waits for as long as she can bear it before she finally corners him and asks him come out beyond the walls with her after luncheon. She’s quite tired of her lady mother’s sidelong glances at Jon as though he’s an interloper once more, and at Sansa as though she expects her daughter to beg for a Manderly at any moment.

 

The day after Jon had asked if she would marry him, Sansa told Robb that Jon should probably move into her bedchamber after the wedding. He still kept the small room he’d grown up in, even as a Prince of the Southern Realms, and Robb near about choked on his wine.

 

He’d refused to meet her eyes for the rest of the day, which Sansa found quite ridiculous.

 

She raises a brow when he hesitates out on the moors, staring at her with this completely unnecessarily conflicted expression, before finally asking if she wants to walk or ride.

 

 _So you’ll marry me?_ she asks later, his tongue on her neck and hands sliding ‘round her waist, and he agrees.

 

And between the two of them, there’s no more pretending.

 

 **

 

Sansa’s a woman grown now at sixteen, but when her mother pulls her brush through Sansa’s hair, she feels like a happy child again. Catelyn chatters lightly about her day as she stands behind her daughter and drags the tines of the brush against Sansa’s scalp and flips her wrist to pull the length of Sansa’s hair out behind her. Catelyn doesn’t always do this for her, only when she’s had long, trying days of her own. Sansa thinks that it’s just as relaxing for her mother as it is for her.

 

“It can be done quietly, Sansa,” Catelyn tells her in a soft voice after a moment or two of companionable silence. “Here in the sept at Winterfell. There’s no need to make a fuss over it.”

 

Sansa wishes she could tell her mother everything—they’ve grown so close over the past years, even with Arya’s ghost casting her shadow over them. Her mother is only trying to help, truly. She isn’t a child any more, just like Jon and Robb don’t tussle over who is to be Lord of Winterfell for the day. Lady Catelyn had already begun softening towards Jon before Howland Reed revealed his true parentage, what with how hard Jon has worked alongside Robb and Catelyn secure Robb’s grip on the Weirwood Throne. Her mother’s concerned tone makes Sansa want to turn around and grab her hands and tell her that she’s _happy_ and there’s no reason for anyone to be sad, least of all her lady mother.

 

“Jon follows the Old Gods,” is what Sansa says instead, busying her hands by straightening the sitabouts on her dressing table.

 

“In the godswood, then, if he insists.” Catelyn weaves Sansa’s hair into a braid for bed and kisses the top of her head in parting.

 

Sansa lies awake under the furs for a long while.

 

* * *

 

 

“What would you like?” Jon asks after a long pause. Sansa frowns and reaches under her hair to wipe away the sweat threatening to discolor the neckline of her pale blue gown. She and Jon mill among the softly-rounded beds of earth at the far end of the glass gardens to observe the progress of the vegetable sprouts planted two moons past.

 

“It’s not so much _like_ as _assumed_. It’s selfish, I suppose, but I’d always imagined…a new dress and dancing and a full hall with wine and music. The bedding always terrified me though, that’s the only thing I don’t like about weddings,” she laughs, and then quickly sobers. “Perhaps that’s not prudent, now. Maybe Mother is right – a small ceremony, just us. Bran’s still confused and Robb…”

 

She stares at the little tomato plants at their feet for a moment with a crease between her eyebrows, and Jon watches as she shakes her head and bends down to brush a fingertip against the little sproutlings. For half a beat, he’s inclined to acquiesce, to slip into a new life with her with only the barest of ripples, but then her loose hair slips over her shoulder, the raised scar (one of many) that curves up and over her shoulder peeks into view between strands of auburn, and he remembers–

 

“I thought I would

never leave;

I thought I would

die here,

just like Father”

 

– and he wants to give her _everythin_ g.

 

“Why not?” He takes a wide step over the beds and lands lightly next to Sansa. “You’re a Princess of Winterfell, I’m supposedly the heir to the Iron Throne, why _shouldn’t_ we make a fuss over our wedding?”

 

Sansa stands back up, the corners of her mouth twitching, and Jon leans forward to place a kiss in one of the little creases forming in her cheek.

 

It’s only been a few days since their walk on the moors, and the feel of his mouth against hers is still new. It sends a shiver right down her spine. She sighs his name in half-protest against his idea, half-pleading for him to keep on going as he is.

 

He sets his hands on her hips and turns his head to kiss her properly this time. It’s already sticky-warm in the gardens. The press of their bodies and the scratch of his beard doesn’t help, but Sansa doesn’t complain when she reaches up to rest her hand on his neck and her fingertips slip in the fine sheen of perspiration on his skin. He’s already sweaty from his morning’s exertion.

 

Sansa had found him reorganizing chain mail and helms in the armory, and the unlaced neckline of his tunic is why she had impulsively asked him along to the glassgardens in the first place.

 

“We’ll get them stuffed full of venison,” Jon murmurs against her lips, the sensation so odd that Sansa huffs out a laugh, “and drunk on wine, and dance them until they’re pulling their shoes off, and then they won’t even care that I’ll pull you away early so that _I’m_ the only one that gets to tear away your dress.” _That_ makes Sansa shiver and wrap her arms around his neck when he kisses her again.

 

She pulls back with shining eyes and a wide smile, much wider than the ones she gives out at court, and only a touch wider than the one she wore the first time she held little Prince Eddard. “Are you sure? You hated feasts when we were younger.”

 

Jon nearly tells her that it was really only because everyone called him Ned Stark’s Bastard, even to his face, and when the guests had toasted to the health of the children, he’d known he wasn’t included. Instead, he tugs her closer and slides his arms about her waist so that she has to lean backwards if she doesn’t want to cross her eyes to look at him. “I want to make you happy, Sansa, always.”

 

Her chin gives the slightest of trembles, and her shining eyes get even shinier, and she nods. “It would make me happy. Very happy.”

 

“Good. It’s settled, then.” Jon bumps her nose with his, and when Sansa blinks at the soft impact, a tear rolls down her cheek, right alongside her grin. _Beautiful girl_ , he thinks, and presses his mouth to hers again.

 

* * *

 

With renovations fully underway in the Great Hall, the family has been eating in Robb’s solar in quite a haphazard style. The ladies and Bran sit at Robb’s desk with oilcloth protecting Robb’s papers and maps, Rickon makes do with his trencher on the low table in front of the couch, and Jon and Robb balance theirs on their knees. Sansa catches Jon’s eye before she speaks during a lull in the conversation.

 

“Jon and I think we should have a feast to celebrate our wedding,” she says, and dips a crust of bread into her wine.

 

The lull turns into full-on silence, save for Rickon’s continued destruction of his trencher. Jeyne gracefully breaks the silence by smiling and reaching out to squeeze Sansa’s hand. “How wonderful! Of course, it should be here at Winterfell.”

 

“We’ll have to wait until the Hall is finished and the new wing is closed in. It shouldn’t be more than a few moons,” Jon tells Robb, scraping the last of the sauce out of his trencher with his spoon.

 

“Long enough to have Maester Luwin coordinate with the Red Keep to send out the formal announcements and invitations. Mother, I think it will take a group effort of the three of us and Sam to examine our stocks and decide what we need,” Sansa gestures to the group of ladies at the table with her wine glass.

 

“Gods,” Robb laughs with a shake of his head, “Jon—how did my sister force you into a feast of all things? I thought the two of you were going to just sneak off into the godswood one afternoon, not invite half of my Kingdom into my home.”

 

Jon shrugs and passes his trencher off to Rickon, who’s finally finished shredding and crumbling his own. “Half of the South, too, it seems.” He waggles his eyebrows at Robb, who stares back, mouth agape.

 

“You’re japing, Jon,” Robb finally manages with a frown. “Half the South, marching through the Neck on Winterfell—“

 

“They wouldn’t be marching on Winterfell, Robb,” Sansa interjects, exasperated. “Wedding guests are not an army.”

 

Catelyn speaks up for the first time: “They’re right, Robb.” Her sharp blue eyes flick from Jon to Sansa, and the nervous tension in Sansa’s belly begins to uncoil. “It’s a joining of the North and South. Both kingdoms should be invited if there is to be any celebration at all. If we want this goodwill to last, Winterfell must be open to peaceful visitors from the South.”

 

“We might as well clearcut half of the Wolfswood to build a tourney ground, then,” Robb grumbles and slumps back into the couch.

 

Bran gasps and twists in his seat as best he can to gaze at Robb with wide eyes. “A tourney?”

 

“A tourney!” Rickon sing-songs and waves his spoon in the air. “Knights and horses crashing into each other—“ He finishes with a stabbing motion and a squishing sound that Jon assumes is spurting blood, and Robb groans and shakes his head.

 

“We don’t have tournaments in the North,” Sansa quietly reminds Bran with such a carefully polite expression on her face that Jon nearly misses the undercurrent of disappointment in her tone.

 

She’s told Jon on more than one occasion about the tourney that Robert had held for Lord Stark, and Bran looks so crestfallen that Jeyne and Catelyn exchange pitying glances over his bowed head. Bran had wanted to be a knight once. If Jon is honest with himself, he knows it’s unlikely that Bran will be able to travel South to see a tournament before the end of Winter.

 

So he leans forward and ruffles Rickon’s hair. “Aye, but we’ll have the South here at Winterfell, won’t we? We’ll have knights aplenty and I’ll wager that our Northern men can still hold their own in a good tilt. That is, unless our good King Robb here has forgotten how to cradle a lance since he’s taken on his royal duties.” He winks at Robb, whose frown melts into a determined smirk.

 

Jeyne is just as excited as Bran, and chatters about how she’s never been to a tournament either. The two of them pepper Sansa with questions about her experience at King’s Landing. Jon rises and crosses to the table to refill his flagon of wine, mouth quirking into a smile when Sansa tilts her head in his direction.

 

She opens her mouth to say something to him, and he can tell by the way her mouth pulls to the left that it’ll be a good-natured jape, but Catelyn cuts in before Sansa can get it out: “Quite a costly wedding, Jon.”

 

“Daenerys wanted this wedding,” he reminds them, “so she’ll pay for it.”

 

* * *

 

It had been a bit of a bluff—he’d had absolutely no idea if his aunt had any intention of paying for anything, and he’d only said so because Catelyn and her piercing stare had caught him off guard. He sends a missive to his aunt the next morning and spends the next few days sparring with the young boys fostering and squiring at Winterfell to try to knock loose the knots in his stomach.

 

The raven from King’s Landing carries a curt response so cold and icy that Jon feels like reminding Daenerys that her—their—words are _Fire and Blood_. She’ll pay half, whatever the cost, but Jon and Sansa and King Robb will have to forgive her and King Aegon’s absence from the celebrations.

 

“She doesn’t sound happy,” Sam frowns from his seat near the fire, running his eyes over the lines. “I don’t think she likes you very much.”

 

Jon shrugs. He’d met his aunt just once, after she’d come from a land far away from Westeros, riding foreign dragons and wearing foreign clothes and with a foreign army at her back, having asserted a claim to all Seven Kingdoms before she’d ever stepped foot on the country she’d declared to be hers by rights. “I’ll be intimidated by her the day she rides Drogon to tell me so to my face.”

 

After lunch, when Jon and Sansa stroll together down the corridor to the junction where he usually goes left to Robb’s solar and she goes right to Catelyn and Jeyne’s, she rises on her toes to give him a kiss.

 

It’s sweet, chaste, _ladylike_ , but her lips taste of the few bites of custard she’d taken as dessert, and Jon can’t help tugging her lower lip into his mouth to swipe his tongue along it. Her hands ball his shirt in her fists. He feels the stretch of the fabric across his shoulders as she pulls him towards her. Sansa says his name from somewhere low in her throat, and before he can think twice, he wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her along with him down the corridor.

 

Sansa knows where he’s headed. She reaches for the edge of the first heavy, carpeted tapestry they come to, pulling it back and sliding through the gap into the alcove. It’s chillier here—the window in the wall has been shuttered on both sides for winter, but the outside air still seeps through the cracks and into the narrow space. It’s dark, too, and Jon’s stomach flips over when he feels—but can’t see, not really—Sansa’s fingers slip under the neckline of his shirt.

 

“We can’t be long,” he whispers against her mouth, “only a few minutes.”

 

“They certainly wouldn’t start the search in the window alcoves,” she murmurs into his ear when he laps at the hinge of her jaw. “Come closer, Jon, I’m cold.”

 

For the briefest of heartbeats, her hands still in their roving over his shoulders, and he knows that she _remembers_. And then her mouth is hotter under his, opens wider, her hands squeezing and pressing with a greater urgency as he crowds her back against the wall and reaches down to tug the curve of her belly against his own. His elbow clumsily knocks into the wooden shutter and she hisses at him, though her lips stretch wide in a smile under his when he kisses her again.

 

 _Could we have gone on much longer?_ He wonders in the back of his mind when she laces her fingers behind his neck and tilts her head back so he can lower his lips and tongue to the soft swells of her breasts that peek above the modest neckline of her gown. Barely a moon has passed since their walk on the moors, and their stolen kisses and embraces have only seemed to intensify the fire between them rather than dampened it. One hand slipped too low, a head turned unexpectedly— _would we have ended up here anyway?_

 

Her chest heaves under his mouth with harsh and heady breaths that roar in his ears along with his raging heartbeat. He pulls back and inhales cool winter air through his nose to clear the smell of her soft skin, slightly rose-y from her bathwater, he’s sure. His eyes have finally adjusted in the dark, and so have hers, it seems, since she meets his gaze with a heavy-lidded stare. Her mouth is slightly agape, color high in her cheeks and he thinks that they’ve made a _terrible_ mistake—they could have been wedded and bedded by now, and he would free to hitch her up against this wall and—

 

His eyes slip shut against the imagery and she whispers his name, shifts against him. He realizes that he’s hard and it’s not even like she’s wearing a very thick gown. Jon swallows and thinks about pulling away, but her hands tug at his sides and she says _not yet_ , and he surges forward to kiss her again.

 

When her palm makes a first, tentative pass across the front of his breeches, he concludes that they _would_ have ended up here, that there was no other way that their story could have ended any other way as long as they lived under the same roof. Maybe that was why Sansa had turned away suitor after suitor, why he’d always felt _wrong_ going into Winter Town to Missus Raqel’s until he just…stopped one day.

 

He and Sansa had been circling each other, stalking each other, and it’d taken an _order_ to marry her for Jon to see it.

 

In _that_ life, though, the one where it happened by chance rather than by decree, his aunt probably _would_ have ridden Drogon North to burn him in his skin. And maybe it’s the pounding of Sansa’s pulse against his lips and the sting in his scalp as she fists his hair, but Jon thinks that it would have been a worthy death.


	3. Chapter 3

Within the space of a few days, half the world descends upon Winterfell. The air fills with the jeers of men already in their celebratory cups, the ring of hammers pounding tent poles into the freezing earth, the creaks and groans of carts rolling past.

 

Meanwhile the highborn themselves enter the Great Hall to pay their respects to the King of Winter and his household. As the bride and Robb’s sister, Sansa’s exhausted, but her fatigue pales in comparison to that of Jeyne’s. The Queen wakes before most of the castle these days, is fed and dressed and crowned by the time the bells ring, ready to accept kisses on the back of her hand and to entertain the ladies that come to call on her.

 

“I’ll take care of that,” Sansa tells Jeyne over and over again, just as much as Jon tells Robb, “I’ll see to this.”

 

Jon spends his days with Rodrick, overseeing the raising of the tourney grounds and in the armory and stables, supervising the workers putting the finishing touches on the stands, repairing chainmail, and polishing armor. Sansa herself feels as though she’s walked the length and breadth of the castle a hundred times over by the time the first guests arrive, giving orders and directions until she’s tired of her own voice.

 

But though they’re part of the House hosting the tournament and celebration, the celebration is meant to be in their honor. That means a great deal of slack is cut for them. Most nights, Catelyn kisses Sansa’s cheek and sends her to her bedchamber with a _get some rest, sweetling_ , only to head back to her own solar to pore over letters and ledgers with Maester Luwin and Sam.

 

The night before the tourney, Sansa excuses herself early from dinner. Jon rises as well to escort her to her chambers, as has been his habit.

 

His hand drifts low on her back as they step down from the dais, and Sansa feels the eyes of her mother and Robb burning holes in the back of her head. She and Jon have been free with their affections, but they’ve been particularly careful to avoid entry into each other’s private rooms. Sansa beyond sure that the only reason that her lady mother has stayed quiet about their not-quite-so-stolen kisses and embraces is because she and Jon have conspicuously respected the unspoken verboten-ness of each other’s bedchambers.

 

(And if Catelyn had ever heard a whisper about the day in the armory when Sansa had boldly unlaced Jon’s breeches to pass her hand over the length of him for the first time, or how their walks across the moors more often than not involve Jon pulling Sansa to the ground to flip her skirts over his head, any freedoms they currently enjoyed would be sharply hemmed in.)

 

The frantic bustling in the main part of the castle doesn’t carry over into the new addition. Sansa lets out a content sigh as the noise fades with each step. Her present chamber lies just beyond Rickon’s and across the hall from Jeyne’s solar, and when they reach her door, she turns to face Jon with spring in her step and a smile on her lips.

 

He kisses her goodnight, always, and tonight is no different.

 

Jon’s fingers curl around the back of her neck and weave through the loose hair at the back of her head as he kisses her. He goes slow and deep, just like she likes. She makes a satisfied noise in her throat, breathing it out through her nose, and yet Jon pulls away sooner than his usual.

 

“Are you hoping to leave me quivering with anticipation?” Sansa asks, but the dry edge that typically accompanies her japes is lacking. She can’t stop the broad smile stretching across her face.

 

Jon taps her chin with a finger. “I’m not like to see you before the tournament. And I wanted to ask you for…a favor. To wear in the tilts.”

 

Sansa’s stomach flutters. She tugs her lower lip between her teeth, pushes her door inward, and steps inside. Jon waits at the threshold while she rifles through the drawer in her dressing table. When she turns around, a white lacy kerchief with a tiny direwolf sigil in the corner clutched in hand, and sees him leaning his shoulder into the frame, his other hand cocked on his hip, she can’t stop her sharp inhale, or her sudden dry mouth.

 

It’s a phenomenon that’s become less earthshattering as they’ve learned each other’s bodies and gained a comfort with each other that had been lacking before, but—he’s in all black, with inky curls tucked messily behind an ear, the candles inside her room bringing out the warmth in his winter-sun kissed skin. Her desire must show on her face, because the corner of his mouth twitches and he takes a sure step into her room, then another, then another until they stand toe to toe at the foot of her bed.

 

He plucks the fabric from her hand and weaves it between his fingers, his stormy grey eyes flickering back and forth between hers. Then, his head turns, and Sansa follows his gaze to the bed that stands not even two steps from where they stand. The furs and pillows suddenly mean more, feel like _more_. Her bodice goes tight, her breasts heavy, and she stares at where his tunic parts at his breastbone, revealing the dusting of hair she knows spreads across his chest and down—

 

“I know,” he rumbles. He reaches out and sets a hand in the curve of her waist so he can pull her to him again.

 

Sansa catches sight of her mother over Jon’s shoulder when he pulls away from their kiss. Her mother’s gaze is inscrutable, and she averts her eyes.

 

“Goodnight, Jon,” Catelyn says, the iron in her voice turning the salutation into an order.

 

Fifteen-year-old Jon Snow would have ducked and run for cover. But Jon’s taken and broken an oath since then. He’s snuck into one capital and helped to found another. He’s shrugged on a new name and let the foreign syllables roll around in his mouth until they’ve just begun to feel natural.

 

So the Jon that stands before Sansa now simply quirks an eyebrow that Lady Catelyn can’t see and mouths _two days_ before he turns on his heel and leaves.

 

Her lady mother says nothing about what she’d just seen. After all, as Jon had said, they would be sharing this room in two days’ time and doing much more than kissing sweetly in front of an open door.

 

A good thing, too, because as of late, Sansa has thought that she might explode each time she and Jon have to stop short at every sudden sound and ringing bell.

 

“Settling in well, I take it?” Lady Catelyn asks with a bright smile, gesturing to the chamber with a wide sweep of her arm. Sansa nods and runs her fingers across the glossy new trunk at the foot of her bed, a nameday gift from “Bran and Rickon.” She’s already stuffed it full of her summer gowns so that there will be space in her wardrobe for Jon’s things.

 

Even though the plans for the addition had been set in stone—literally—by the time the raven from King’s Landing had arrived, Sansa’s pleased that her chamber has more space than her last one. Her old chamber is to be given to Maester Luwin, since the sweet old man’s knees can’t take the three flights of steep stairs to his old cell anymore. Still, Sansa casts a critical eye over her bedframe.

 

“This will do for now, I suppose,” she murmurs, running her fingers over the cap of the bedpost.

 

Catelyn hums from where she’s brushing out the mantle Sansa had shrugged on for her ride today. “What was that?”

 

“Oh, the bed. It’s a bit narrow—it’s made for a girl, not a married woman. Jon and I will have to talk to Willem once all the fuss is over,” Sansa replies, taking a step back and passing her gaze over the wall behind the bed. They certainly had enough space to expand… “It’ll be fine for a while, though. He and I are used to tight quarters.”

 

The last words were tossed out off hand, more for herself than her mother, but Catelyn jerks just a bit, the mantle in her fingers nearly slipping to the floor.

 

It’s easy for her mother and Robb and the others to pretend that she and Jon suddenly appeared at Riverrun, to not wonder about exactly how they lived in that vast stretch between the Crown Lands and the Riverlands. She and Jon will never forget, though—the hunger pains, how Jon would give her more than her fair share of the pilfered food, that she ate it all even though she protested, that he let her ride ahead of him, cradled back into the seat of his thighs and against his chest, and how intimately a person learns the lines of another’s body when they curl together for warmth at night with nothing but body heat and a travelling cloak between the two of them.

 

(Maybe the narrow bed wouldn’t be so horrible, now that she thinks about it.)

 

The tourney dawns bright and early on Sansa, the curtains of her bed tugged back by the same maids who lace her into her favorite blue gown and brush through her hair until it shines like waves of copper. Jon had been right the night before – she does not see him at breakfast, nor on the way to the tourney grounds beyond the walls of Winterfell.

 

The morning is lost in chatter with her family in the upper box. Bran recites facts about the knights and sponsored Northern men as the horses tear down the alleys towards each other. Rickon crows as lances lower and shatter. Sansa and Jeyne clap and cheer for the competitors of each bout.

 

“You could still tilt if you wanted, Robb,” Sansa suggests lightly, sipping her wine. “I’m sure Ser Rodrick could kit you out at a moment’s notice.”

 

“Alas, I’ve not had the practice.” Robb pats his stomach, where he’s still trim, but with a certain lordly give that Jon lacks. Jon and Rodrick Cassel have been charged with the training of the Frey boys and other sons of Northern Houses sent to foster at Winterfell, and Jon’s lean, muscled body reflects it. “Jon’ll have to represent the family, I’m afraid.”

 

Jeyne grabs Sansa’s hand, breathes _Oh, Sansa, look,_ and once more a daughter of House Stark lays eyes on the black and red armor of a son of House Targaryen. His dark stallion prances in the dirt, making the three heads of the Targaryen sigil bob and weave. When he reaches up to settle his helm over his head, Sansa sees a single flash of white—a circlet above his elbow, where he’s cinched her handkerchief.

 

He wins his tilt against the Glovers’ sponsored man in two passes. The first time he blasts past the Stark’s box, he lowers his lance and locks it into place in a single, smooth motion, like it’s naught but a twig. At the end of the lane, he tosses the shattered butt of it to the ground, takes his second lance from the elder Frey boy, and kicks his horse into a gallop. This time the ear-splitting snap crackle boom of his lance’s impact sends his opponent to the ground.

 

“Seven hells,” Robb mutters. “I didn’t realize he’d gotten so good.”

 

“Neither had I.” Sansa’s voice is high and breathless even in her own ears; Jeyne is shaking with just as much excitement; Bran and Rickon can barely contain themselves.

 

Robb had always won when they were boys and Sansa has watched Jon with the young ones that live and foster at Winterfell. She knows now he’d been holding back. Teaching, not competing. The lads he’s taken charge of are half-grown; Sansa doesn’t think she’s seen him tilt at anything swifter than a canter.

 

Lady Catelyn stares at Jon as he rides past, looking like she’s seen a ghost. Sansa reaches for her mother’s hand and pauses when she sees the goosebumps standing up on Catelyn’s skin. Catelyn takes a shaky breath and meets her daughter’s eyes. “He tilts like Rhaegar. Like he can see four strides ahead of himself—“ Her voice catches and she shakes her head.

 

Sansa’s heart pounds against her ribs and she grips her mother’s hand. “It’s just the colors, Mother.”

 

“No.” Catelyn’s fingers are like iron around Sansa’s. “In all my days—I’ve still never seen anything like what I saw at Harrenhal.”

 

The crowd had stirred, titillated, when the man who had once been known as Ned Stark’s oathbreaking bastard had first entered the field in the storied black and red of House Targaryen. The fever rises like the tide as he unseats Harrion Karstark, Robert Estermont, and Ser Gendry Waters, a young knight that had a familiar look to him that Sansa hadn’t been able to place, even though she’d caught him staring up at Winterfell with the strangest look on his face when he’d arrived.

 

Each time Jon tilts, shivers of anticipation run down Sansa’s spine, nervous energy, a touch of fear for _what if he slips this time_ , and a tug in her belly when she watches his shoulders easily shift the burden of the lance so that it carves through the air like a hot knife through butter. She feels her emotions ride high with the crowd, with Robb’s adulating cheers (“My brother—my brother, there!”), with the furtive smiles that Jeyne sends her way from her seat next to Robb.

 

“He’s going to win,” Catelyn says, throat tight, when he tumbles a knight from the Vale. “Jon’s going to win.”

 

The Northern houses can sense it too, start to flush and cheer at the victory. Jon may be a Targaryen, but he might as well be an Ice Dragon, what with Ned’s features and the snow-white direwolf that paces at the end of the alleys. Perhaps if House Tyrell had sent Loras, the outcome would have been different, but he’d been “indisposed,” and instead Jon faces up against Garlan, who’d held his own more than adequately so far.

 

For all of Jon’s preternatural skill, it still takes three passes before Jon rocks Garlan back against the rump of his horse, his lance rolling under his arm to tumble into the dirt.

 

Her kerchief ‘round his elbow isn’t white anymore, but Jon tugs on the knot to keep it in place. Sansa can’t hold back the laugh that bubbles up out of her chest. The stands are beyond raucous; The odds had been long for a Northern victor in a Southern-style tourney, yet Jon Snow-turned-Targaryen of Winterfell canters down the alley to snag the wreath of blue roses from the hands of Beth Cassel to the cheers of the crowd.

 

Sansa is on her feet and stepping past Bran and Rickon before he’s even turned his horse towards the stands. She feels like she floats down the steps as he rides down the alley and braces her hands on the railing to hide their trembling when he reins up in front of her.

 

His stallion turns in a circle while Jon pulls his helm off and tosses it to Olyvar. The masses in the stands hum all around, but all Sansa sees is the color in Jon’s cheeks over his beard, the swirls of red on a sea of black draped behind his saddle, and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes as he urges Shadow to the railing.

 

“My lady Sansa,” he calls, lifting the crown and holding it out of her reach when she stretches a hand forward to grab it. She leans forward, her hair falling over her shoulders to swing in the free space over the void beyond the railing. The wreath of roses that he places on her head might as well be the golden crown of the South by the way that the crowd responds.

 

The circlet is heavier than she’d expected, and his lips softer against hers than she’d’ve expected after hours on horseback. The wine she’d been sipping and the exhilaration of the tourney makes her forget herself for half a moment, lets her lift her fingers to Jon’s cheek and return his kiss with more fervor than is most likely proper for the smallfolk’s eyes.

 

Jon rides away in a blur of black and red, the pounding of his horse’s hooves lost in the chants of Sansa’s name. Catelyn’s face is guarded once more when Sansa turns back around, Robb’s brow furrowed in discomfort, and it’s Bran that saves Sansa’s face from falling. He grabs her sleeves as she passes, and she immediately stops and clasps his hand in hers. “You look so very pretty, Sansa,” he tells her, and Sansa bends down to press her lips to his temple. “Even if you weren’t to marry Jon tomorrow, I think he still would have given you the crown of roses.”

 

Sansa’s mouth tugs to the side at that, because Bran’s right—he would have, she’s sure, but not for the sweet, knightly reasons that Bran believes. Her coronation would have lacked a kiss, but he would have chosen her in an instant, and she still would have been on her feet before he ever called her name. The only difference is that the smallfolk would have whispered about it for years, muttering the stories of _the Dragonknight and Queen Naerys_ under their breath.

 

(and they would have been right.)

 

* * *

 

“Stop iiiiit,” Cat whines.

 

Ryn and Eron are playfighting behind her, shoving her up against the edge of the wagon they’ve clambered into. She’s the oldest at nine years old. She’d told her sister and brother that they’d be needing to get to a high spot if they wanted to see Princess Sansa.

 

They see her every fortnight, when she comes down to the square to pass out food for the poor smallfolk. Her and Lady Catelyn, King Robb’s mother and from whom Cat got her name. Lady Catelyn had smiled at her when Cat’d told her that. Patted her head and given her an extra loaf of bread and told her to come up to the castle when it were finished and she’d give her some work. _Just folding the laundry_ , she’d told Weston, but if she worked hard enough, her duties would grow as she did.

 

So they see Princess Sansa every fortnight, but she’s always in plain dresses. Cat wants to see her all prettied up, like the princesses in songs. She’d looked so fancy-like the day before, when Prince Jon won the crown of blue roses for her at the tournament. But Marya, who works as a maid for Queen Jeyne, has been telling Cat all about the wedding dress. Marya’d even held Princess Sansa’s hand the other day when she’d been having a fitting, whatever that means. Cat only has two dresses, and she has to share one of them with Ryn, anyway.

 

“Look!” Ryn whispers in Cat’s ear when the doors open. All the high-born lords and ladies whisper to each other too, and it sounds like a great wind passes through the courtyard.

 

There’s a path between the door and the godswood for her to walk on, laid out with straw so that her gown doesn’t get muddy before Prince Jon sees her. Cat doesn’t understand why all of a sudden everyone is making a fuss over Prince Jon now, since he was a bastard like her not even a year ago. No one’d cared much about him when he was King Robb’s brother before, and even with rescuing Princess Sansa back when Cat was still a little girl. Marya has tried explaining it to her, how he was made a prince out of nothing all of a sudden, but it makes Cat’s head hurt and she always falls asleep before the end of the story.

 

Princess Sansa is beautiful. She laughs at something King Robb says, and Cat claps her hands over her mouth to keep from squealing. Marya’s talked about her dress for ages and ages, but they’ve gone and covered it up in a great big grey cloak that drags behind her. That’s got white ‘round the edges, and the Stark direwolf is all done up in white across the back of it, too.

 

“It’s Ghost,” Eron says. Cat rolls her eyes.

 

“It’s just the Stark wolf, it doesn’t have a name.”

 

Eron shrugs and pops his thumb into his mouth. “Shtill looksh like ‘im.”

 

It’s Princess Sansa’s hair, though, that makes Cat sigh and tug at the ends of her own red ringlets. Princess Sansa was a real lady now—they rang the bells for her seventeenth name day nearly a moon ago and the King sent food from the castle down to Winter Town. Cat hopes that when she’s grown, her hair will be as long and lovely as Princess Sansa’s. It’s been braided at the sides, like Marya does for Cat sometimes, and the blue roses that Prince Jon won for her in the tourney have been threaded into it. And the rest of it is shiny, so shiny, and swings against her back.

 

“Ohhhhh, she looks like a winter fairy queen,” Cat sighs.

 

Several of the high-born folk that have traveled to Winterfell with their bright clothes and strange accents follow Princess Sansa into the godswood. Cat wishes she could go, too. She wants to wear grey when she gets married, now, and put roses in her hair just like Princess Sansa. She starts thinking about it in her head, imagining a faceless figure standing across from her underneath a heart tree—

 

\--but then Eron and Ryn shove at each other again, the dumb babies, and Cat chases after them to keep them from getting into trouble and messing up all the Queen’s planning. She has plenty of time to dream, later.

 

* * *

 

Sansa’s fingers trip over the latch to her door twice before the bolt slides home. Jon’s hands squeezing her waist and his lips at the back of her neck have made her breath come quickly. Her limbs feel heavy and her tummy is starting the hot-cold swirling it does any time her kisses with Jon take a turn towards something more-than-just-kissing.

 

The wine she’d drunk at dinner has probably helped her along, just like it’s letting her drop her head back onto Jon’s shoulder with more ease than she’d otherwise have allowed herself. Jon hums in appreciation along the bend of her throat, but she can still feel the roses in her hair crunch under the weight of her head.

 

“You smell good,” Jon murmurs, bumping his nose behind the corner of her jaw. “Right here.”

 

“Rose oil.” Her stomach quivers again when he makes some sort of throaty, understanding noise and laps at her earlobe. “I should take the flowers out,” she whispers, and peels herself away from the circle of his arms.

 

She doesn’t want to, not really. She’d much rather twist her body around and let Jon do everything that he’s been whispering into her ear for weeks now, as the date of their wedding crept towards them at a glacial pace. But to do that would be impatient. Frenzied.

 

There is something to be said for taking care at moments like these, Sansa thinks as she crosses the room before Jon can snag her arm and pull her back to him. They have all night, after all. They don’t have to rush each other for fear of being caught anymore. More than anything, though, the thought of waking up on the morrow surrounded by the shredded and bruised roses that he’d worked so hard to win for her just feels… _wrong_.

 

She seats herself in front of her looking glass, pushes the bells of her sleeves up her arms and out of the way, and reaches up to pull the blooms from her hair and set them in the jug of water on her dressing table. For a little while, Jon watches her from the armchair by the roaring hearth, and in the looking glass, Sansa watches him.

 

It’s too dim for him to catch her eyes in the reflection. When she gets to the back of her head, where she can’t see where her fingertips trip along the braids, she keeps her eyes busy by following the absent back-and-forth of his knuckles under his chin, where his beard has been trimmed short and neat.

 

By the time she starts to unpin her braids, Jon seems to have had his fill of sitting quietly. He toes off his boots, shrugs out of his vest and leaves it draped across the back of the chair, and steps up behind her. Brushing her loose hair out of the way, he begins to unlace the back of her gown.

 

She’s running a brush through the length of her hair, enjoying the gentle tugs as Jon pulls the laces through the eyelets, one after the other, when she feels him pause. “Are these new?” he asks, breaking the companionable silence with a surprisingly quiet voice. It’s rough, too, from yesterday’s tourney and the raucous feast tonight. It sends a shiver down her spine when it’s coupled with the slide of his fingertips along the top edge of her stays.

 

“Do they look new?” Sansa asks with an arched brow, tilting her head to the side and setting the brush down onto the surface of the dressing table. Jon slips his fingers under the shoulders of the gown and pushes the fabric down her arms to reveal the pristine dove-grey undergarment.

The new set of stays are the one part of this whole tourney-and-wedding planning adventure that she’d not shared with her mother. They were a secret kept solely between her and the maidservants who’d made them for her.

 

Sansa pulls her arms out of the sleeves and Jon bends down to press a line of kisses along her shoulder to her neck. “Very pretty,” he murmurs into her skin, slipping his hands around her waist and upwards, until his palms catch where the stays swell outwards with the curve of her breasts.

 

Sansa’s breath hitches with the flash of warmth between her thighs, and she turns her head to catch his mouth and meet his tongue with her own. He tastes of ale, which he’s always preferred to wine, all earthy and yeasty, while his hands make smooth strokes up and down her front until she pulls away and swings her legs around on the bench to face him. He flashes a half-grin and leans forward again, stopping short when Sansa leans back and away.

 

“What is it?” His brows twitch towards each other in a moment of confusion until she sees his eyes catch the movement of her knees falling away from each other under the fabric of her skirts. “I’ve created a monster, it seems,” he tells her as he kneels at her feet and gathers the heavy drapes of wool in his fists.

 

“Oh, please,” Sansa sighs, toes curling and thighs shivering when his fingers skate up her calves. He’s also been overcome by the same quiet carefulness that’s been settled in Sansa’s bones ever since he took her hand and led her from the Great Hall. He takes his time in pushing the fabric to her waist and over the back edge of the bench. He glances upwards, eyes skating over the new and _pretty_ stays, and Sansa’s mouth curves upwards when she sees how his grey irises shrink to the thinnest of bands. “You adore it.”

 

He sets his mouth to her through her smallclothes, making a show of using his lips and tongue to probe and tease until she has her fist wrapped in his curls and her thighs spread wide. Only then does he pull them down her legs and toss them aside.

 

“Are you nervous?” he asks, sliding two fingers into her and running his other hand up and down her calf.

 

Sansa shakes her head, lips pulled between her teeth, and can’t help but squeak a bit when he pushes her knee wider so that he can lower his head and lap at the little nub that makes her hips pop upwards. “I used to be…up until my nameday,” she says, her head dropping back with a little breathy laugh. “And then I wasn’t scared anymore. Now, I just want it.”

 

Something about that must strike a chord with Jon, because he withdraws to wrap his hands around the backs of her knees and pull her forward until she thinks she’s bound to slide off the front of the bench and to the ground. But then he’s back, twisting three fingers under where his tongue works, as he’s done since her nameday nearly a moon before. She isn’t so naïve to not realize exactly what he’s doing. Once upon a time, the realization would have made her cheeks hot in embarrassment, but not anymore.

 

Not since _then_.

 

Just thinking about it sends her stomach into a neat little flip. She lets her head fall to the side and her eyes slide shut to relive the memory to the tune of Jon’s tongue sliding over her again and again.

 

They’d been into their cups then, too, though much more so then than now, which is probably why Jon had felt brave enough to pull her into the glass gardens. She’s sure he’d only meant to steal a kiss, maybe two, perchance three, but they’ve always underestimated themselves.

 

Jon twists his fingers and hums against her right as she remembers the weight of his body bearing her down into the earth, the hot length of him in her hand, and the sticky air on the bare skin of her legs. She jerks and gasps. She wants to coast to her peak, though, not rush, so she breathes deeply and cards her fingers through his curls to anchor herself.

 

In her mind, she skims forward through greedy kisses and petting hands to the moment where Jon had groaned at the bump of the head of his cock against her slick folds. And that slight pressure had felt good, so good, and she’d not been able to keep her hips still against his. Maybe that had been what had kept him from jerking away, like she’d thought he was going to. He’d tipped his pelvis forward, instead, hissed through his teeth while Sansa moaned aloud. And then he’d nipped and sucked at her lower lip while he’d done it again and again.

 

 _Careful, Jon, **careful**_ , she’d breathed, even as she’d gripped his upper arms and opened her thighs wider so that he could slide against her more easily. It had been overwhelming in a heady, eye-opening way, to have Jon panting in her ear and his body rolling against hers.

 

It’s the combination of remembering _then_ -Jon sitting back on his heels to take himself in hand and _now_ -Jon replacing his fingers with his tongue that nudges Sansa over the edge. Shivers dance along her arms and legs, curl her toes against the floor.

 

“Don’t pack these up with your dress and maidencloak,” she hears him tell her from afar. He’s pulled back and wiped his mouth on the fabric of his shirt, which he’s stripped over his head at some point. She’s confused about what he means until he reaches behind her to untie the laces of her stays.

 

“You like them?” Sansa asks with a slow blink, forcing her eyes to focus.

 

Jon’s chuckle is soft. “I like them.” He cups her elbows and urges her to her feet. Her gown finally falls all the way to the ground, and Jon works to loosen the laces at her back, fumbling time and again when she runs her fingers over the skin of his torso with feather-light touches. “I want you to wear them again.”

 

The way that he says it, like a secret only meant for the two of them, makes her shiver and wrap her arms around his neck. He kisses her with a slow mouth and searching tongue. “If that’s what you want,” she murmurs against his lips, and Jon finally shimmies the stiff thing over her hips. “I’ll hide them somewhere safe and I won’t tell anyone where they are, not even you, and then it’ll be like a surprise.”

 

He doesn’t say anything at that, but his throat bobs with a swallow, though that may be because of her hands making quick work of his breeches. She nearly jumps when one hand settles on her back and the other cups a breast. In all this time, she’s never completely shucked her clothing away, only moved it this way or that to make space for his hands and mouth. Now they’re just skin against skin, and he’s so warm and firm against her, particularly where the warm length of him lays along the curve of her belly.

 

Sansa loops her arms around his waist when he walks them back towards the bed and presses her fingertips into the shallow divots on either side of his spine. “I could put them on for your nameday,” she murmurs, and Jon brackets her face with his hands and groans into her mouth.

 

She can’t help but giggle when he bumps into the edge of the bed and falls backwards, offbalance, because he’d stopped paying attention somewhere between her saying it and him imagining it. He moves backwards onto it, pulling her with him, and when she’s settled over his thighs with his cock in her hand and a grin on her lips, his hands drift from her hips to her waist and he says, “Only if you ride me like this in them.”

 

And there it goes again—her belly doing turn-and-tug and turn all because of the timbre of his voice and the heat in his eyes. _‘Ride’?_ she wonders. It takes a moment for the pieces to fall together in her head. A thrill runs down her back, urged on its course by Jon’s sharp inhale when she tosses her hair back over her shoulder. His hands come up to catch the sway of her breasts, and his mouth falls open just a bit when she shuffles her knees forward and shifts her hips down to press his cock between her slick folds and his stomach.

 

“Do I have to wait until then?” she asks, rocking her hips forward and back, forward and back to mimic what he did to her on her name day.

 

“Oh, gods no,” Jon croaks out. He pushes himself up onto an elbow to wrap an arm around her waist and tug her a bit lower to catch her lips in a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss. Then they’re both holding their breath while Sansa brings a hand between them and Jon’s arm eases her back, back, back—

 

She’s tentative at first, partly because she’s learning as she goes and partly because she’s not quite sure how _different_ this is from using their hands and mouths on each other. She goes too far forward and stops herself from falling with hands on his chest, sending Jon to his back once more. Her knees slip wider somewhere in the meantime and Jon curses under his breath, pops his hips up against her, shakes a moan loose from her chest. Jon called it ‘riding,’ hadn’t he? Sansa closes her eyes and tries to remember the feel of a horse between her thighs, and rolls her hips like she’s following a canter.

 

Once Jon starts talking, he can’t seem to stop, and as Sansa’s movements grow bolder, his language gets filthier. There had been a time where a crass mouth had caused her to avert her eyes and bow her head, and even now, she remembers the obscenities the rioters in King’s Landinghad flung at her, but not now, not anymore.

 

“Fuck, Sansa,” he groans, gripping her thigh to guide her. It’s near-dark, this far from the hearth, but Sansa doesn’t need the fire to know how wide his pupils are blown as his eyes flit between the shadows where they’re joined and her face.

 

“I nearly took you that night in the glass gardens. I was so fucking close to it and you were so wet and I thought—I’d already had my tongue and fingers inside you and what fucking difference would my prick make—“ he sucks in air next to her ear. She’s shifted to fist the sheets by his head and moved one of his hands to her breast, urging him to squeeze it, run his thumb over its peak “— yes, yes, fuck, and I’d already sucked at where our babes will too and gods I only held back because you wanted me to.”

 

Sansa gasps and grinds down at that, swivels her hips against the flat bone right above where they’re joined, and Jon somehow manages to kiss her and whisper sweet vulgarities at the same time.

 

“Keep going,” she orders, tugging his hand from her hip—she doesn’t need help with that anymore—and lacing their fingers together on the mattress. He grunts in approval, a sound which, like everything else coming out of his mouth, rolls through her ears, down her throat, and straight to the juncture of her legs ( _cunt_ , Jon’s called it and _oh_ , just thinking the word nudges her down the same delicious slide that she’s already traveled once before tonight).

 

“Keep talking?” he asks with small smile that Sansa would have parried with a raised eyebrow if he hadn’t rolled her nipple between two fingers even as he asked the question. His own cheeks are flushed like Sansa’s knows hers are, and his curls are starting to stick to his forehead and against the soft skin behind his ears. She lowers her head to lap at the salty skin there, and when Jon talks, it’s low and rumbly, right in her ear: “If I’d fucked you then, it would have been done, Sansa. We wouldn’t have left the glass gardens for three fucking days. We probably won’t leave this room for three days—not ‘til I’ve taken you every single way I can think of.”

 

Her peak is so close, she can taste it at the back of her throat and feel it at the corners of her eyes, and her hips have started to quiver, but she’s still hovering right at the edge, so she presses her forehead into Jon’s shoulder, breathes in the salty, soap-scent of his skin, and whines, “Tell me.”

 

Jon groans, and she feels him turn his head into hers and nuzzle her cheekbone. He must know she’s so close that she might lose it if she doesn’t tip over soon, because he moves the hand that’s been toying with her breast to her thigh. He holds her steady while his own hips compensate for her lost momentum. He’s going shallow and quick and it sets her shoulders shaking even before he starts murmuring that he wants to fuck her on her back, on her hands and knees, on her side while he straddles one of her thighs. The imagery of it all dances behind her lids, shifting and changing just as quickly as his cock moves in and out of her. When he tells her he wants her to split her legs over his face, she thinks about the way he’s looked tonight already, all laid back against her pillows, and she starts to moan, borrowing Jon’s _fucks_ and _gods_ for the last few seconds until she shakes through her release.

 

“Look at me, Sansa,” Jon calls from somewhere far away with a strained voice. The cords of his body feel stretched taught underneath where she’s half-collapsed on top of him, and she pushes herself upwards until her hair slips over her shoulder to mix with his dark curls. His thighs shift against hers, and she peeks down the bed to see him bend his knees and dig his heels into the mattress, feels his hands making firm strokes from her flanks to her shoulders and back down again.

 

When she meets his grey eyes again, he mutters her name and thrusts up into her. She tips forward and presses her lips to the corner of his mouth, kissing his beard moreso than his lips, but he groans all the same and digs his fingers into the flesh of her hips while he moves under her. He comes with a grunt, pushing her hips back to seat himself deep inside her. He likes to be worked through his release, coaxed down slow, so she sits up and rolls her hips a few times, grinning when it pulls a low moan from him.

 

“Wicked,” he murmurs after a moment, peering up at her with half-lidded eyes and tracing his thumbs along the creases of her thighs. “Wicked girl.”

 

“Wife,” Sansa corrects him, and reaches forward to brush his sweaty curls off his forehead. He turns into her touch, and she nearly laughs at the sweet, contented look on his face, given that he’s slowly softening inside of her and he’d been taking every god’s name in vain only a few moments before.

 

“Lovely wife,” Jon says, blinking slowly at her, and balancing her as she shifts up and off of him. “Finally my wife.”

 

Sansa rolls her eyes at him and pauses to kiss him before she slides off the bed. Sure enough, his lips are soft, but slow to respond under hers. She recognizes the sleepy haze settling into his bones. “Yes, finally,” she indulges him, dipping a soft cloth into the basin of water on her vanity and passing it between her legs. “It only took several moons to get here.”

 

Jon grunts behind her and she wrings out the cloth a second time. “It only took several years,” he says, meeting her eyes straight on as she climbs back onto the bed, and her heart clenches in her chest.

 

He smooths his palm up her thigh while she scrubs his seed from his lower belly and thighs. “I know,” she replies, and tosses the cloth to the floor. With a slow hand, she traces her fingertip around his navel and watches the plane of his belly ripple like a wave under her touch. “But that’s a secret for us alone.”

 

* * *

 

Jeyne leaves Robb abed the next morning to meet with Sam in the glass gardens and discuss how to get the castle back on schedule once their guests depart. As she crosses the courtyard, she looks east to admire the lingering pink and orange clouds, and something catches her eye, enough to bring her to a halt in the middle of the courtyard.

 

The First Keep rises tall and strong against the sunrise, the gargoyles circling the roof cutting impressive silhouettes against the soft clouds drifting across the sky. She’d overheard some maids giggling about the creak of the bedframe last night, and she’d done her best to hurry past Sansa and Jon’s door this morning, but not before overhearing her goodsister’s breathy laughs and the tell-tale bumps of bodies shifting on a mattress.

 

In the early years of Jeyne’s marriage to Robb, they’d enjoyed a certain privacy. A solar had sat between their old bedchamber and the corridor. Jon and Sansa wouldn’t have that, but given how well they’ve taken to each other, Jeyne thinks, they really should have a certain freedom in their private lives.

 

She shrugs her mantle higher on her shoulders and frowns at the squat fortress. It doesn’t have proper bedchambers—no Keep from before the Age of Heroes does —but the chimneys are intact, and the rotted floorboards could be replaced wood from the tourney grounds when they're torn down…

 

After building an entire addition to the Great Keep, planning an airing-out and the framing of a few interior walls seems like child’s play to Jeyne. And when the babes start coming…well, Jeyne won’t include that little detail when she speaks to Robb.

 

“Is it true? About Sansa and Jon?”

 

Jeyne jumps and whirls around at the unfamiliar voice. It’s a girl, nearly a woman, but dressed in breeches and boots. She held the reins of a pony, and clearly had just walked through the gate. Her braid barely deserves the name, she’s dirty and sweaty, and her pony too—the poor beast breathes steam into the cold air.

 

Jeyne nearly tells her that if she needs lodging, there are inns in town that will be emptying soon.

 

But then the girl’s black eyebrows pull together over grey eyes when says, “I missed it, didn’t I?” and Jeyne knows that expression better than she knows her own face.

 

 _Where have you been?_ Jeyne nearly asks. _Robb wanted to sit you next to Lord Stark and Lyanna once all this was done._

 

“Your mother breaks her fast with me after the bells ring,” she tells Arya instead, tears gathering in her eyes and spilling over before she can lift her hand to wipe them away. “Would you like to join us?”

 

Arya hands the reins over to a stableboy’s free hand and follows Jeyne back towards the Great Keep, tilting her head back and running her eyes over the new lines of the castle.

 

Home. They’re all _home_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


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